Is this possibly the worst broadband in the world?
Web crawler
Four kilometres to the north of here, in semi-rural Kent, the pavements are stuffed with fibre-optic cable and the streets are lined with drab green cabinets, all nicely tooled up for superfast broadband. But here, we rely on plain old ADSL piped in from a small BT exchange, 1.7km to our south (as the crow flies). You can see it …
Switching to IT: Which qualifications are worthwhile?
Commentards, help a fellow reader
From time to time we dip into El Reg Forums to highlight questions raised by our commentards. Today we republish this post from Thomas 4, who writes:
I'm considering a change of career from my current medicinal line of work and stepping into the great grand world of IT. My current plan is starting in helpdesk work and moving up …
Windows 8: Great for media PCs...
...But what else?
From time to time, we dip into El Reg Forums to highlight questions raised and experiences recounted by our commentards.
Today we republish this post from Steve Knox, who writes:
My media center PC at home was a discarded work PC with Windows Vista Business on it. It was slow and flaky, as Vista can be, but since an upgrade to …
El Reg debuts badges for commentards
Site News Badges? We do need some stinking badges!
Today we introduce badges for commentards. This feature will be rolling out over the next few hours.
We kick off with three badges: bronze, silver and gold, which will appear alongside all non-anonymised comments made by those who qualify.
The Register currently publishes almost 40,000 comments a month, and forum posts account …
Sock-wielding movie pirates go to prison
Walk-on parts in the Big House
Two members of a movie piracy gang were sent to prison yesterday in Virginia.
Willie Lambert, 57, of Pittston PA, was sent down for 30 months and ordered to pay $450,000 in restitution, along with other co-defendants. Sean Lovelady, 28, of Pomona, CA, was sentenced to 23 months and must pay $7,500 in restitution. Two more …
Pristine WWII German Enigma machine could be yours
A lot cheaper than capturing a Nazi submarine, too
A World War II German Enigma cipher machine is on the block at Bonhams, the London auction house, this month.
The 1941 oak model, described as an "extremely rare example", is expected to go under the hammer on 14 November for an estimated £40,000-£60,000.
In 2010, a 1939 Enigma fetched £67,250 at auction - that model was …
JDA Software finds a RedPrairie home companion
$1.9bn merger agreed
JDA Software is selling itself to RedPrairie, a privately equity-backed enterprise software firm, for $1.9bn in cash.
The $45 a share deal is 33 per cent higher than JDA's closing price on October 26, the day before Reuters told the world that the company was exploring a sale.
JDA and RedPrairie specialise in different areas of …
The Register's iPhone app gets a makeover
Site news Works better, too
Head over to the iTunes apps store for the latest iteration of The Register iPhone app.
Version 2.0.5 adds offline reading capabilities, full iPad support - and comments!
Props to the developer, Ocasta Studios, for making the app work and look so much better than our last effort.
Fingers crossed, the rating for our app …
Incompatible IT systems blamed for bank sale collapse
RBS £1.7bn branch sale to Santander is off
Royal Bank of Scotland's $1.7bn sale of 318 branches to Santander has gone titsup.
The Spanish bank pulled out, largely "because of problems over integrating the two banks' IT systems", The BBC reports.
The Telegraph has a teeny bit more detail, reporting a "series of IT problems that have resulted from a lack of compatibility …
Red Hat stalks VMware in field sport ambush
Pic Gets message out to VMworld via grassroots channels
Giant Red Hat shadowman logo in field, with message, "Calling all enterprisers" Red Hat, you cheeky, cheeky monkeys
Red Hat wants to grab the attention of delegates to VMworld Europe in Barcelona with a guerrilla marketing stunt that deploys the biggest hashtag we have seen.
For its "Red Hat welcome", the vendor daubed the …
Man the floodgates! David Cameron takes to Twitter
Are you sure about this, Prime Minister?
Prime Minister David Cameron opened for business on Twitter yesterday (6 October) with his first message:
I'm starting Conference with this new Twitter feed about my role as Conservative Leader. I promise there won't be "too many tweets..."
It looks like he'll need a full-time Twitter secretary to deal with the barrage he is …
Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales marries Kate Garvey
Tony Blair tips up at wedding in London
Our congratulations to Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, who married Kate Garvey in London yesterday.
Among the guests were former Prime Minister Tony Blair and wife Cherie, and A-list politicians drawn from the new Labour elite, including former Cabinet secretaries Lord Mandelson, David Miliband and James Purnell.
Alastair …
EU rejects Oracle secondhand software licence grab
Oracle internet argument rebuffed
An attempt by Oracle to stop the sale of secondhand licences on software downloaded over the internet was rejected today by the community's highest court.
European Union Flag The court's ruling hinges on the EU
directive on the legal protection OF
of computer programs.
Image by Dimitar Nikolov
In its judgment today, the …
Gone fishin' with Nokia
Sign of the times
Nokia sign dismantled, with letters rearranged to spell 'ONKIA' A dismantled Nokia sign at Oulu's Technology Village, Finland
Reg reader Andy Crofts snapped the above picture - after re-arranging the Nokia sign to read "ONKIA", the Finnish verb to fish with a rod and line.
Andy was inspired by a story on YLE, Finland's public …
Honour for Queen's IT manager
Personal award
The Royal Household's IT systems manager Toby Zeegen made it onto The Queen's birthday honours list today.
He is now a member of The Royal Victorian Order, given by The Queen to people who have "served her or the Monarchy in a personal way".
There are five classes of the order, and the top two confer knighthoods on the holder. …
Dell Cloud descends on Europe (by way of Slough)
US and Canada first
Dell opens a data centre in Slough next month, to support the delivery of cloudy services to Europe.
The doors open to European customers on August 31, so no pricing and little in the way of firm detail yet
But the company has plenty to say about the introductory trial it is running in US and Canada for Dell Cloud.
On offer …
Commentards! Know a good hosting firm? Recommend a good laptop?
Readers want your advice
For a few months in 2008 Reg Hardware ran a Q&A column. The format was very simple: readers sought advice – and commentards were invited to supply answers.
Typical questions ran along the lines of:
Which top-of-the-line graphics card should I buy?
and:
How do I install fonts on my Linux Acer Aspire One?
This experiment in …
Aviva presses wrong button, fires 1,300 by email
KILL! KILL! KILL!
As HR mistakes go this is a doozy. On Friday, Aviva's asset management arm, Aviva Investors, dismissed the entire global workforce, more than 1,300 strong, by mass email.
Within minutes,the HR department sent another mass mail retracting the notice and apologising for their mistake. Clerical error was blamed for exit mail, which …
John Lewis touts own-brand broadband
ISP for the middle classes
The British middle classes' favourite high street retailer, John Lewis, is renowned for its customer service.
Britain's ISPs are not renowned for their customer service, although sometimes they are fast and often they are cheap.
So one can see why John Lewis thinks it will make a significant splash with this week's own-brand …
Norwich FC scores own goal in net kit leak
Fans cry foul over bully boy tactics
Norwich City FC has apologised for its thuggish response to a teenage fan who grabbed pictures of the the football team's new strip from its own website.
The club's web designers mistakenly exposed pictures of the kit on public parts of the site, while prepping a page to promote next season's kit.
Chris Brown, a 17 year old IT …
The 10 baddest IT pros
BOFHs who got caught
In 2008 a survey of 300 sysadmins by Cyber-Ark grabbed a lot of press coverage when a whopping 88 per cent of respondents said they would steal company information if fired.
BOFH 2 BOFH: Let's go to work!
One quarter said their organisations had suffered internal sabotage and security fraud, and one third believed that …
UK public sector IT jobs rebound - for permies
Web devs feel the outsourcing squeeze
A quick note on the UK tech jobs scene in February, sourced from Computer People. The recruitment firm's IT Monitor service reports 13,024 permanent IT vacancies advertised during the month - slightly up on January.
The public sector and media and creative sectors were bright spots, with vacancies up 28 per cent and 12 per cent …
The Register channels jobs into jobs channel
Editorial initiative
Recently we slipped out a new editorial channel to cover work issues. It's called "Jobs" and you can find a link on the main nav bar which appears at the top of every page of The Register.
This is a small launch designed for now to pop all articles we write about jobs, training and IT education into the one place. Also in …
El Reg Forums FAQ
Site news Have we missed anything?
First of all
Read the house rules.
<
Forums FAQ
Badges
In November 2012, The Register introduced gold, silver and bronze badges for commentards, along with forum privileges for each badge.
The qualifying thresholds for badges are:
Bronze More than one year members and more than 100 posts in the last 12 months.
Silver …
El Reg user forum opens to public, HTML for all (mostly)
Site news Why we rejected BBCode
As of now all commentards with five or more posts accepted for publication can create topics in our new El Reg forums. We have made this easier to find: the signpost link is in the secondary nav bar on the front page.
At the same time we've opened simple HTML formatting to all commentards who have had five posts accepted for …
Commentards, we salute the return of the long post
10,000 characters. Surely that's enough
Recently, we limited the length of posts made by commentards to 2000 characters. We did this for no better reason than that the 2000 characters had always been our publicly announced limit, and we thought that we should do what we said on the tin.
So we waited for the dust to settle. Not terribly popular ... and so 10,000 …
El Reg issues CIO scrapheap challenge
Let's do vox pop
Dear reader, we are conducting an experiment in vox pop journalism, and that means we want to involve you, the man or woman on the IT street.
We get to ask you a bunch of questions and synthesise your replies, votes and other feedback into a lovely impressionistic Reg-juicy article.
We have the means, the writers, the forums …
Hey Commentard! - or is that Commenter?
Poll You decide. OK, we decide
Last month a Reg reader contacted us via our Twitter account to complain about the use of the word "freetard", on the grounds that, as an analogue of "retard", the word was derogatory to people with mental handicaps.
Americans may have a little difficulty in understanding the substance of this complaint, in the way that most …
Hey Commentards! This pre-populated 'reply to' is for you
Deniggling
We took our time to remove this niggle, but you should like this little update:
If you click the "reply" button on a comment containing a headline your "Title field" is now pre-populated with "Re: (same headline)"
You can if you like change this to insert your own headline or - if you are perverse, depopulate the field entirely …
El Reg's comments policy? It's all in moderation
House rules given a spring clean
The Register has changed its comments moderation policy, making the UK's biggest IT pro talking shop even more immediate, enthralling and noisy.
As of right now we have moved to a hybrid moderation model for comments.
Over 95 per cent of comments will go straight on to the site, rather than being individually moderated by our …
Record numbers of readers flock to The Register
Hey Mister Tally man, tally me November
The Register and its sister publications Reg Hardware and Channel Register climbed new heights in November 2011, bagging 46 million page impressions and 6.6 million "uniques" for the month. We now have a certificate to prove it.
abc.org.uk/Certificates/17591287.pdf
That represents a lot of thought, planning and hard work by a …
Nekkid Tech: The end of the year show
Big Data? Puhleese!
Hello again from Nekkid Tech, podcast about enterprise tech hosted by Greg Knieriemen. This week's episode finds Greg and crew in reflective mode as they consider some of the big stories of 2011.
Joining him on the show are trusty sidekick Ed Saipetch of Joyent (@edsai), Louis Gray, of Google+ at Google (@LouisGray), Brad O' …
Take this survey: Win an iPad 2
Promotion Here's the deal
Neverfail, the business continuity software specialist, is offering Reg readers in the UK the chance to enter a lucky dip which will see the winner take away a shiny new iPad 2. Oh yes.
The taking part is easy, but read the large print below.
You need to complete a short survey about business continuity, which includes a few …
Reg reader ratings go worldwide
Your chance at last to press the Orgasmic button
A short note. In 2008, we introduced reader ratings to some Register stories and then to all stories on the site.
For some reason the feature was available to UK readers only - although the ratings bar appears globally on Reg Hardware and Channel Reg.
Today, we introduce the ratings sliders to the bottom of all Reg stories …
Japanese take World Solar Challenge
Dutch and USA fill the podium
Tokai University has taken the World Solar Challenge after one of the tightest last days in the history of the race. After 3,000km and five days, just over an hour separated first and second place, with The Netherlands' Nuon team running a close second.
Drivers Kenjiro Shinozuka and Kouhei Sagawa celebrate Team Tokai's win
In …
Solar Challenge leaders whizz towards Adelaide
WSC Chequered flag almost in sight
Dutch team Nuon recovered ground lost to Tokai on Day 4 of the World Solar Challenge, ending the day just 20km behind the race leader. The top two are now less than 500km away from the finish line in Adelaide.
Tokai and Nuon are equally capable of driving at South Australia's 110km speed limit, but strong sidewinds today seem …
Team Philippines solar car in self-combustion drama
WSC Bush not the only thing burning in Oz outback
Day three of World Solar Challenge and the big news point was a solarcar catching fire at Tennant Creek, NT. The Register's eyewitness on the scene, Richard Flint, racing manager and driver of the Durham Uni team, reports:
Whilst we were setting up to charge the batteries with the array, we noticed some activity around another …
Solarcars: meet road trains
WSC Day 3 at the solarcar races
After yesterday's excitement over bush fires at the World Solar Challenge, the race kicked off again at 8am, with 24 teams still competing entirely under their own steam.
The rest, including plucky UK contender Durham, surely the greenest team in the race, with just seven members, have had to put their cars on trailers at times …
Bushfire halts solarcar race in its tracks
WSC Frustrating wait for teams
Great excitement on day 2 of the 2011 World Solar Challenge - a bush fire halted the 3000km race across Australia for several hours.
Nuon's Nuna6 drives by a bush fire: Pic: Nuon
The leading pack of solarcars, Tokai, Nuon and Michigan, were holed up early afternoon at a roadhouse called Wauchope, about 1100km south of Darwin …
And they're off! Day one at the solar races
WSC El Reg pursues early leaders
Yesterday, 37 solar cars set off from State Square in Darwin, NT for the start of the 3,000km 2011 World Solar Challenge across the Australian continent. El Reg's Special Projects Bureau was there to wave them off...
wsc start montage
...and then join the race down the Stuart Highway.
Nuon solarcar on the road
The first …
Solarcars are hot!
WSC Rules of the road
On Sunday 16 October, 39 solarcars will set off from Darwin to race the length of the Australia continent. Three thousand kilometres and four or five days later they can relax when they reach the finishing line in Adelaide.
The Register’s Special Project Bureau will be there to cover the 2011 World Solar Challenge, for the …
El Reg follows World Solar Challenge
WSC Hot and bothered about electric cars
At almost 3000km in length, the Stuart Highway is the world's longest road. The highway traverses the middle "strip" of Australia, connecting Darwin in the north with Adelaide in the south, and cuts through hostile terrain, mostly desert and mostly flat.
Also it's bloody hot - with day-time temperatures hitting 38C in the …
Twitter update: @regsecurity – The Reg bags imposter
It's ours, all ours ...
After a flurry of activity, we have gained control of @elreg, a Twitter fan feed with about 5,000 followers. Thank you, Adam Wood, for looking after that for us. We have also gained @theregister and @regsecurity after filing trademark abuse reports with Twitter. Thank you, Twitter.
@theregister was a moribund RSS-to-Twitter feed …
Tooling up for the Microsoft Virtual Academy
IT circuit training
Disclosure: you may recall that The Register is a media partner of the Microsoft Virtual Academy – a cloud-centric training website for IT pros. Last time we did some media-ing, several hundred Reg readers signed up to take the free-of-charge, self assessment courses.
The curriculum includes sundry "training tracks" on the …
Hey Commentards! [This title is optional]
Site news Reg forum tweaks
Yesterday, we added three new features for Reg commentards.
The most obvious - and many of you spotted this already - is that commenters no longer have to write a title to accompany their post. We like headlines but many of you don't, so this is our gift to you.
We have introduced a new sorting option - now can you arrange by …
The Reg dips toe into social media ocean
Majority pursuits
Today, The Register's official Twitter account http://twitter.com/#!/regvulture reached 5,000 followers.
OK, so no biggie and never let anyone say that we are pioneers in such things. But in mitigation we are quite a big website with thousands of active commentards, albeit mostly of the anti-social media kind.
Any ways, in …
DNS hijack hits The Register: All well
Update NetNames statement
On early Sunday evening, UK time, The DNS records of many websites, including those of The Register and The Telegraph, were hijacked and redirected to a third party webpage controlled by Turkish hackers.
The Register's website was not breached. And as far as we can tell there was no attempt to penetrate our systems. But we shut …
Fantasy Premier League falls over
Can't play, won't play
Not the best start to the season for Fantasy Premier League, the hugely popular, free game for grown ups, which crashed today.
At time of writing fantasy.premierleague.com is reachable, but members can't sign in and make any changes to teams - apparently this is important because of the postponement of the Spurs-Everton game on …
vSphere 5.0 – up close and virtual
The Infosmack on flagship VMware product
Yesterday VMware boss Paul Maritz launched vSphere 5.0 to an expectant world.
Paul Martiz Maritz at vSphere 5.0 launch
El Reg covered the gig in San Francisco with the following stories:
VMware launches vSphere 5 into the clear blue sky
VMware: We will virtualize entire world in six years
VMware taxes your virtual memory …
The Infosmack on: Designing for VMware
Podcast Deep dive
This week we have another Infosmack Deep Dive, with hosts Nigel Poulton and Chris Evans.
With their guests they debate the merits of building new technology form the ground up specifically for VMware, versus taking existing technology and bending and twisting it to work well with VMware.
Listen using the Reg media player below …
